Escalating his administration’s response to the disastrous Gulf oil spill, US President Barack Obama planned to announce yesterday that a moratorium on new deepwater oil drilling permits will be continued for six months while a presidential commission investigates, a White House aide said.
Controversial lease sales off the coast of Alaska will be delayed pending the results of the commission’s investigation, and lease sales planned in the Western Gulf and off the coast of Virginia will be cancelled, the aide said on condition of anonymity before a midday Obama news conference.
Those steps, along with new oversight and safety standards, are the results of a 30-day safety review of offshore drilling conducted by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar at Obama’s direction.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Salazar briefed Obama on its conclusions on Wednesday night in the Oval Office, the aide said.
Meanwhile, the US Coast Guard has pulled commercial fishing boats from Gulf of Mexico oil cleanup efforts in Breton Sound off the Louisiana coast after several people became ill.
The Coast Guard says crewmembers on three vessels reported nausea, dizziness, headaches and chest pains on Wednesday afternoon. Four people were hospitalized, including one who was flown to a hospital.
The Coast Guard told all 125 commercial vessels that were helping clean up spilled oil to return to shore. Medical workers evaluated the crewmembers as a precaution.
Breton Sound is about 50km southeast of New Orleans.
BP executives were waiting yesterday to find out if the risky “top kill” procedure — pumping heavy mud into the leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico — was having some success.
If it stops the flow, BP would then inject cement into the well to seal it. The top kill has worked above ground but has never before been tried 1,500m beneath the sea. BP pegged its chance of success at 60 to 70 percent.
If not, the company had several backup plans, including sealing the well’s blowout preventer with a smaller cap.
An earlier attempt to cap the blowout preventer failed. BP could also try a “junk shot” — shooting golf balls and other debris into the blowout preventer to clog it up — during the top kill process.
A permanent solution would be to drill a second well to stop the leak, but that was expected to take a couple months.
In related news, a storage tank that spilled crude oil from the trans-Alaska pipeline on Tuesday, shutting down the line, was the site of a fire three years ago for which Alyeska Pipeline Service Co faces fines of US$506,000.
Alyeska continues to contest the proposed fines for safety violations connected to the fire at Pump Station 9.
Up to several thousand barrels of crude spilled from the pipeline on Tuesday into a 8.7 million liter storage tank, which overflowed into a containment area. The containment area, a yard lined with an impermeable barrier and surrounded by a berm, apparently captured all the oil.
Alyeska has proceeded cautiously with cleanup.
Spokeswoman Michelle Egan said she could not predict when the pipeline might be restarted as the company assessed risks.
Oil companies operating on Alaska’s North Slope were ordered on Wednesday afternoon to further reduce production, from 16 percent of their regular output to 8 percent.
Alyeska has storage capacity for that production until noon today, Egan said, and it’s possible pumps on the main pipeline could be restored by then, allowing oil to flow at regular levels.
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